The Serpent Rogue Starter Guide

So you have decided to step into the corrupted lands in attempt to purify and save its people. But you have no idea on where to go, what to do first, or even how anything works? Our The Serpent Rogue Starter Guide will get you moving through the early parts of the game with ease!

The Serpent Rogue Starter Guide – Your First Steps

First, let's start with what will be the core loop of The Serpent Rogue. As the game starts, you'll be in a hub town. There's a smithy, an alchemy table, and a potion crafting bench as well as several resource spots. But your overall goal is to head into an infected area that being ravaged by corruption. As you head inside, the map layout remains the same, but supplies and enemy configurations will change. You need to figure out where the source of corruption is and stop it. But you are on a time limit. At regular intervals, a corruption storm will sweep the area and kill you, so manage your time accordingly.

Collect Ingredients and Brew Potions

So the first thing I highly recommend to start your journey is to craft some potions. But first, you will need to research some items. In the Abandoned House, there is a tree stump out front. Interact with it several times until a bunch of worms come out. Collect them then go into the pond. You should be able to feed the worms to the fish in that pond. Hold down the interact button as the fish fly out to catch them. These are Fishbones and they will be crucial. Next, there should be some bushels of tea leaves nearby, harvest those. Finally, head into town proper and you should find some bushes of blueberries and aloe plants growing on the rightmost side of the town.

While you can go to sleep to make these resources come back, I advise against it. Sleeping in The Serpent Rogue lowers your maximum stamina gauge until you eat some food. Worse still, the game flat out just won't let you “sleep on an empty stomach” which can greatly mess up your survivability. Until you have a sustainable means of scavenging, the only thing you can eat this early on will be worms. So for now, just research until these mentioned items are touched up.

Once you've researched all of these items, you should be able to craft potions. While we will have a dedicated guide to more advanced potions, the ones listed here are crucial to get through the game's early stages. Those potions are:

• Healing+. Ingredients: Blueberries, Fishbones, Aloe
• Damage+: Tea Leaves, Fishbones, Aloe

The Healing+ potion is self-explanatory. Open up your inventory and assign ito to one of your four slots. Hit a button to ready it, then hit Consume to drink it and you'll heal. Damage+ is worded a little weirdly. Whatever you do, do not consume this potion because it will damage you. What you want to do is equip it, hold down the ready button, then hit the attack button to throw the potion like a grenade at enemies. Congratulations, you now have a powerful, albeit consumable, ranged attack option that can make short work of certain enemies.

The Serpent Rogue Guide Hub – Planning Runs

Next, time to plan your corrupted land runs. Go to the silver chest and deposit everything you have in your inventory except for those potions. The Serpent Rogue has a weight encumberance system and you will want to travel as light as possible to get the most supplies.

Since The Serpent Rogue focuses a lot more on alchemy and item crafting than combat, your early runs will be just that: supply runs. Look about for abandoned barrels and overturned iron cages. These will contain items like metal scraps or even food like cheese. Scavenge nests for eggs and egg shells. Get in, get items, get out, drop it all off at your silver chest, rinse and repeat. You should build up a healthy supply of not just potion-crafting materials, but raw goods for item-crafting and food preparation.

Early on in The Serpent Rogue you will get a woodcutting axe. While it is tempting to use it as a melee weapon, I highly recommend you use this as a last resort. An axe is the only way for you to chop down trees for wood, and all weapons in the game have limited durability. Wood is crucial since it's used for cooking meals and produces charcoal, which is needed at the smithy to build more advanced tools. Use the axe to get wood at all costs, otherwise your first few hours will be a slog.

What will help you throughout these runs are the animal totems. Using these totems, you can transform into different animals: specifically a chicken, a dog, and a rat. If you're going to defend yourself but don't want to waste precious weapon durability, these transformations are good alternatives. Fair warning, while transformed your health and stamina pools will be affected. On the other hand, you can use these transformations to safely discover and research local flora and fauna.

Quick Tip: The rat form is especially useful since it allows you to search inside overturned boats and shake loose additional items.

Research and discovery is another crucial element in The Serpent Rogue. It will help highlight important items as well as highlight the demeanor and behavior of certain enemies and creatures, ones you can then use to your advantage. For example, Fauns are fond of chickens, and attacking a chicken will cause them to come after you in a murderous rage. This is important because the game also has an animal husbandry mechanic where feeding animals their preferred food can domesticate them and turn them into allies. This can also be done to recruit human allies to your side.

Earning Money In The Serpent Rogue

Now that you've gotten down the basics of exploration and crafting potions - you'll want to earn some money. Since it takes 100g per Vessel to banish the corruption, you'll need it!

In the Abandoned House area right outside the entrance to The Camp, you'll be able to complete Requests for money. Simply brew the requested potion and complete the contract to get some gold. We've got the full potion list if you need it!

Gaining Followers & Companion Animals

One of the aspects of the game is getting Human followers to carry the vessel and fight alongside you, as well as animal companions to fight with you. In order to unlock the ability to hire humans, you'll need to unlock The Pier, and for animals you'll need to complete a quest for Mavka. We've got a few guides to how to utilize followers below:

• The Serpent Rogue Followers and Creatures Guide
• The Serpent Rogue Mavka’s Keep – Nature's Call Guide

Crafting Items

While you can find, or buy, many items in the game - it's sometimes more resource-effective to just craft them. You can craft swords, axes, accessories and more at the Forge in The Camp. It's just inside the west entrance.

To craft, you'll need charcoal from crafting food. Once you've got that - you can craft items. Here's a few examples:

• Sword - 3 Metal Scraps + 1 Log
• Axe - 1 Metal Scrap + 1 Log
• Picklock - 2 Metal Scrap
• Claw Amulet - 1 Log + 1 Textile + 2 Spectral Fuel
• Torch - 1 Log + 1 Textile

Upgrading Items

This is a bit underexplained. At the forge in The Camp, you can also enhance your items, and change their stats. Here's how to enhance items in The Serpent Rogue.

• Open up the Enhance screen
• Select the weapon/item you want to enhance or change
• Click the INGREDIENTS tab and select the changes you want to make.
• Hit the craft button.

As an example, if you want your sword to be 20 damage and do burning damage:

• Select the sword
• Go to the ingredients tab and select Claw (20) + Sulfur (Burning)
• Reforge the weapon and now it has 20 Damage + Burning

How to get The Serpent Rogue Purifying Potions

This one is a bit tricky to figure out on your own. You can find Purifying potions scattered throughout the world, but there is no ingredient that gives "Corruption." Instead, if you want to get some Purifying Potions, you'll need to get a sanctum from the Whispering Well in the Camp. Once you've contained it - rather than having a follower pick it up, you can split it into Purifying Potions.

The Serpent Rogue Starter Guide & Tips

There is still a lot to cover with The Serpent Rogue, so here are a few quick tips and tidbits to help you as well.

• If for whatever reason you have run out of tools like Axes or Shovels, look for corrupted skeleton warriors. It is very likely they'll be wielding one of those weapons. Chuck some damage potions at them and collect your replacement tools
• There is a way to bring back allies or animals you cared about. Eventually, you'll gain access to a cemetary in the main hub. All you have to do is talk to the caretaker and use a shovel to exhume the corpse.
• You can transform into a Faun to venture into deep water.
• There is a shop to the east of the Church where you can buy weapons, and sometimes ingredients for potions.
• Having trouble with the boss at the end of the game? Our Serpent Rogue Final Boss Guide has you covered!
• To get to the final boss, you'll need to progress through the swamp - which requires that you rebuild a machine. Here's how to find all of the swamp gears!

Hopefully now, you have a better grasp on what to focus on and how to go about things in The Serpent Rogue. Good luck and happy hunting.